I went to bed reading Fire and Fury, which, as you probably know, is Michael Wolff’s ribald and riveting account of the early days of the Trump regime. It quickly became clear in the book that no one involved in Trump’s campaign expected, or wanted, him to win.

That was a horrible thought: Trump and his motley crew of enablers, the doltish adult children, sleazeballs like Paul Manafort and Corey Lewandowski, fascists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller—they all overestimated the American people.

They thought we were better than we were. They thought they were safe, because we would never elect Donald Trump.

I went to sleep with this somber thought. At some point in the night, I woke up smelling smoke. I got up and looked around and couldn’t find anything. It was 10 degrees in Baltimore that night, so I assumed it was a neighbor’s fireplace.

Around 9 a.m., my wife woke me. “The dog is acting weird,” she said.

The dog was shaking, pawing at us.

“Smoke!” my wife yelled.

I looked over—and smoke was coming up through the floorboards. Then it burst into flame. By the foot of the bed.

Fire and fury ensued. This is the essence of this year.

Ultimately, the fire in my bedroom wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. The fire department—Big Government!—was there before the fire destroyed much. They cut through the floor and broke the windows. Most of the damage was caused by the smoke. We were safe, and we didn’t lose anything of real value. We have renters’ insurance, and I’m writing this from a hotel, where I spent a lot of time waiting on the bureaucracy of insurance and disaster mitigation. I bought the audio book of Fire and Fury and listened to the rest of it as I threw out former possessions that were now nothing but junk.

However difficult things were for me, it turned out to be much better than what was going on with many of the people in the figurative conflagration of the book—especially Steve Bannon.

Bannon is the almost Ahab-esque antihero of Fire and Fury, which in many ways charts his rise and fall—at least up until the point that the book’s publication precipitated a further fall. For being such a horrendous pseudo-intellectual schlub, Bannon is also fascinating, a far-right svengali. According to Harvard studies, during the last election, Breitbart was three times as influential as its next-closest competitor (measured in terms of retweets and shares), Fox News. Bannon was at least partly responsible for that—and for getting Trump elected.

That perception, that Bannon orchestrated Trump’s victory—as shown in another book, Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain—was probably the No. 1 factor in his August White House ouster, even more important than the alt-right terror that ripped apart Charlottesville that month.

In Fire and Fury, though, Bannon is correct about how horrible the Trump kids and Jared Kushner are. It was actually beautiful to listen to him (or Holter Graham, who read the audiobook) railing against the idiocy of Jarvanka—Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

And Jarvanka were also right about him and his whack-job far-right Leninism, reveling in the destruction of the world. That circular firing squad is what makes the book so compelling: All of these people are so disastrously wrong about America, but they are pretty correct when they assess each other’s weaknesses. Bannon’s weaknesses are nearly infinite—and the most important ones are intellectual. Sure he’s a slob and all that, but he is a sexist, racist, “nationalist” who created a section of the Breitbart site called “Black Crime.”

After Wolff quoted Bannon saying that Don Jr.’s Russia meeting was treasonous, the president went on the attack with a new epithet, “Sloppy Steve.” Bannon tried to apologize, saying he was really attacking his predecessor as Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort. But it wasn’t enough. Bannon was fired first from Breitbart and then from his SiriusXM show (with Fox pre-emptively refusing to hire him). Worst of all, billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer, who have supported most of his endeavors and funded his nationalist endeavors, cut ties with their schlubby honey badger.

I watched out all of this play out on cable as I tried to deal with the disaster bureaucracy. And it was delightful to see the pundits all talking about Bannon’s terrible week, even if it came for all the wrong reasons.

Bannon, by the way, did not have the worst week in Washington, D.C., during that particular time. That would go to the more than 12,000 Salvadorans who live in the district; the numbers are far larger if you count the D.C. suburbs, which have large Salvadoran enclaves. Ultimately, a Department of Homeland Security directive to end the temporary protected status for people who came to the U.S. from El Salvador following a 2001 earthquake will affect more than 200,000 people who have been in the U.S. for more than 15 years now. It’s almost impossible to imagine how deeply that will affect their communities.

Bannon may be gone, but this is the essence of the dark alignment of Bannon’s alt-right with Jeff Sessions’ revanchist racism and Trump’s big boner for a border wall. So when Trump was meeting with a group of senators and asked why we have so many people coming here from “shithole countries,” like El Salvador, Haiti (which already had its TPS rescinded) and various nations in Africa, it was clear that it didn’t matter whether or not Bannon was in the White House or “in the wilderness” or not.

Trump, Bannon and their crew may have overestimated the electorate in their expectation of losing. We should not make the same mistake and overestimate them. Whatever happens to Steve Bannon, racists now rule the executive branch.

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a project of alternative newspapers across the country. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

Donald Trump’s second year in office is beginning like every new Star Wars movie: The Resistance is in tatters, trying to rebuild.

Yes, there is plenty of Internet #Resistance, ranging from insane conspiracy theories to serious commentary and organizing—but this online profusion has resulted in confusion in real life.

The divide is mirrored in the Bernie/Hillary split—but it is also something deeper and something that moves further to the fringes. The divide, in many ways, mirrors the increasing divisions within the far right, where the alt-lite litigiously differentiates itself from the more openly racist alt-right.

Last year, there was the Disrupt J20 protest on Inauguration Day, which led to the prosecution of nearly 200 individuals, identified by the police and the prosecution as anarchists. The next day, hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets for the women’s march.

There is little sympathy or support between these groups, with many anarchists and hardcore organizers mocking feel-good liberals who #Resist while supporting the FBI, intelligence agencies and Robert Mueller. More mainstream liberals, on the other hand, attempt to distance themselves from anyone further to the left than they are for fear of being tainted by the anarchist stench of “hippies.” As a result, these liberals have been far more concerned about Putin’s abuse of reporters than they have about the prosecution of journalists who were covering the J20 protests. Though these J20 cases have been largely ignored by the mainstream press, they have had an immeasurable effect on the state of protest—creating fear, distrust, and division on the left.

Over the last couple of weeks, some of these tensions have bubbled up, largely in online debates about a real-life rally slated for Washington, D.C., on Jan. 27. The “People’s March on Washington,” also called the “The Impeachment March,” has gained a lot of online support—25,000 are “interested” on Facebook, and more than 2,000 say they are going. It has also gotten a lot of pushback.

The rally was organized by a group called People Demand Action, headed up by a 24-year-old man named Lawrence Nathaniel, who is a big-thinking, marketing-minded millennial leftist who says he worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign and then, after he got over his disappointment following the primary loss, for Hillary Clinton. When Trump won, he began to think about what he could do.

Nathaniel has a long list of sometimes improbable plans and goals, including opening a free, private school in Bamberg, S.C. However, the march calling for the impeachment of the president indeed gained traction. But as interest in the march grew—and organizers began trying to raise money—so did the questions surrounding it.

I first heard questions about the march when Dave Troy, a technologist and writer in Baltimore, wrote to me. Troy is deeply concerned about Russian trolls and “active measures.” When he saw confusion surrounding the event, he initially thought it might be the result of some Kremlin campaign. But after he started to look into it, he attributed the perceived failings of the organizers to inexperience rather than malfeasance.

Nathaniel has set up a number of organizations to promote the march and his various other endeavors. People have been calling them “shell organizations” or “false fronts,” but that seems a little too harsh. The one organization that has filed official papers is called the Presidential House, and it proposes some sort of weird shadow government in Charleston, S.C., with Nathaniel as president. Troy called it “unhinged, fantastical nonsense.”

I called Nathaniel and asked for an explanation.

“When I started the Presidential House I started volunteering for the Obama campaign,” Nathaniel said. He acknowledged that the original scheme was kind of goofy, but said it came from his enthusiasm for Obama. “I was 16 or 17 and was very excited, and so I started something called the Presidential House to get out in my community.”

For Nathaniel, inexperience is part of the point of protest.

“Many of us, especially young people in the political realm, don’t really get our voices heard, because it’s mostly a ‘who has more experience’ type thing versus a protest where we’re able to organize it, either locally or nationally, and our voices can be heard much easier there than working with politics,” Nathaniel said.

However, he said he is still interested in electoral politics and local issues. “My goal was to run for United States Congress this year, but I decided not to because Annabelle Robertson, who is way more qualified than I am, decided to run (against Republican South Carolina Rep. Joe “You Lie” Wilson). So I decided to put my action behind her and get out and protest.”

Critics point to the “Rally at the Border,” in San Ysidro, Calif., the only other rally Nathaniel has organized. It failed amid concerns of top-down organizing that didn’t take the needs of the community into consideration, and could have put a lot of people at risk.

Once news of the failed border rally became public, people began demanding to see the permit for the march on Washington. Nathaniel says he has a permit and has met with D.C. police, Park Police, the Secret Service and the FBI.

But for local organizers in San Ysidro and D.C., working with the authorities is precisely the problem: Washington, D.C.’s police department threw more than 70 grenades and emptied hundreds of canisters of pepper spray at the Disrupt J20 protest during the inauguration. At a right-wing rally recently, Park Police claimed to be working with right-wing militias.

“In D.C., we do not like interfacing with police,” Brendan Orsinger, an organizer in D.C., told me. “We don’t like the idea of the state giving permission for us to march. And we don’t need it. … It’s actually much safer not to have police involved in the planning of the march.”

Orsinger has been vociferous in his criticism of the march. But like Troy, he doesn’t see a conspiracy: “There are good intentions here. But one of the things that I learned over the last year is that good intentions are not good enough to make change happen in this country.”

This raises the larger question: What are protests for? The prosecution of the nearly 200 people charged with rioting charges after the inauguration may have had a chilling effect, but it has also shown the effectiveness of protest—if the U.S. Attorney’s office works that hard to shut them down, then they must have some power.

So, the question becomes: How can a larger movement bring together Russiagaters like Troy, local grassroots organizers like Orsinger, and enthusiastic young people like Nathaniel? If people really want to resist and not just #Resist, they need to answer this question while embracing a diversity of tactics and figuring out how to form coalitions.

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a project of alternative newspapers across the country. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

Donald Trump had the audacity to attend the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson last Saturday, Dec. 9.

“I knew a little before everybody else, but I’ll simply say this without even referencing Trump himself,” Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba told me when the visit was announced. “The opening of the Civil Rights Museum is an important moment of a recognition of struggle, and out of that struggle, we’ve seen people historically rescue themselves in a state that has been known for some of the most negativity that the world has ever seen.”

Lumumba took Trump’s election last year with a certain level of equanimity, saying that on the day after the election, “I woke up in Mississippi, which means whether it is Obama, Clinton or Bush, Mississippi is still at the bottom.”

But Trump’s refusal to condemn the white supremacists in Charlottesville caused many civil rights leaders, including Rep. John Lewis, to threaten to boycott the opening if the president attended. But it wasn’t just about Charlottesville: White supremacy may be the only consistent ideology of the Trump administration.

“We have to observe this corrosion of integrity and this erosion of people’s human and civil rights and identify what role or what steps we’re willing to take,” Lumumba said. “It’s important that we recognize that struggle. But any celebration of struggle, any recognition of struggle, must consider what the next step forward is.”

Trump, being Trump, made the controversy worse by seeming to support a justification of slavery. Days before the presidential visit to the first state-sponsored civil rights museum, Roy Moore, the Alabama senate candidate who is supported by the president despite allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior with minors, went viral, saying that America “was great at the time when families were united—even though we had slavery, they cared for one another.”

Just in case there was any question about what Trump thought of this definition of his “Make America Great Again” catch phrase, the very next day he tweeted: “LAST thing the Make America Great Again Agenda needs is a Liberal Democrat in Senate where we have so little margin for victory already. The Pelosi/Schumer Puppet Jones would vote against us 100% of the time. He’s bad on Crime, Life, Border, Vets, Guns & Military. VOTE ROY MOORE!”

When he finally got to Jackson, Trump—who was invited by the state’s white Republican governor—spoke to a small crowd, primarily reading from a script, and not at the main event. “The fight to end slavery, to break down Jim Crow, to end segregation, to gain the right to vote, and to achieve the sacred birthright of equality—that’s big stuff,” Trump said. “Those are very big phrases, very big words.”

Lumumba has some more big words for Trump. He wants Jackson—a city in deeply red Mississippi, with a long history of racism and white supremacy—to be the “most radical city” in the world.

“Ultimately, what I mean by being the most radical city on the planet is giving people more access,” he told my colleague Jaisal Noor. “We do this through the … movement of people’s assemblies that allow people to speak to their conditions, and so that is very important to us.”

People’s assemblies are “vehicles of Black self-determination and autonomous political authority of the oppressed peoples’ and communities in Jackson,” according to the Jackson-Kush Plan, a document produced by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) and the Jackson People’s Assembly. “The assemblies are organized as expressions of participatory or direct democracy, wherein there is guided facilitation and agenda setting provided by the committees that compose the people’s task force, but no preordained hierarchy.”

The movement grew out of a collaboration of black activist groups forming in the Mississippi River Delta in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction, and quickly managed to take over the city of Jackson, when Lumumba’s father won the mayorship in 2012.

“Free the land” was a common refrain in the elder Lumumba’s first campaign. It came from his trip to Mississippi in 1971 to start an autonomous black nation in that state with the “Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika.” To get to their land, Lumumba and his comrades had to face down the Ku Klux Klan. This weekend, with the president’s visit, his son, who succeeded him as mayor, had to take a similar stand.

The younger Lumumba had resisted repeated calls to run for office. But after his father died in 2014, he decided to run. He won a decisive victory earlier this year, giving some hope as to what a city can do, outside of larger national trends. Lumumba and the People’s Assemblies offer a serious alternative to Trumpian authoritarianism.

“A radical is a person who seeks change,” he said. “A radical is a person who does not accept the conditions as they see them. But we look at the conditions of our community, and we see a need for change. Then the reality is we need to be as radical as the circumstances dictate we should be.”

Baynard Woods is a reporter for the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a project of alternative newspapers across the country. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

After the automotive attack in New York City on Oct. 31, Donald Trump called for the death penalty for the perpetrator.

“Would love to send the NYC terrorist to Guantanamo but statistically that process takes much longer than going through the federal system …” he tweeted about the suspect, Sayfullo Saipov. “There is also something appropriate about keeping him in the home of the horrible crime he committed. Should move fast. DEATH PENALTY!”

It’s hard not to compare this response to his “both sides” response to the automotive terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Va. Trump has built his political career on demonizing Islam, but neither he nor his staff have condemned white nationalist terrorist organizations—whose ideology they continue to openly espouse.

When Trump was asked whether or not James Alex Fields—who on Aug. 12 drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters, killing Heather Heyer and seriously injuring 12 others—was a terrorist, he dissembled. “And there is a question. Is it murder? Is it terrorism? Then you get into legal semantics. The driver of the car is a murderer, and what he did was a horrible, horrible, inexcusable thing."

By calling Fields a murderer, rather than a terrorist, Trump is able to maintain the myth that white-supremacist terrorists are bad actors in a field of otherwise “fine people.”

Trump regularly mentions “our heritage” when he talks about the Confederate monuments that the Nazis descended on Charlottesville to defend. And his chief of staff, John Kelly, once laughably called “the adult in the room,” recently said that Robert E. Lee was an “honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state,” and that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”

Our racist nation finds it easy to condemn all Muslims as terrorists. And, since the “anarchist bombings” of the 19th century, we’ve also easily associated the left with terrorism. At press time, a “We the People” petition to “formally recognize Antifa as a terrorist organization” had 362,010 signatures. The entire right-wing mediasphere has been flipping out over an imagined “November 4” conspiracy where Antifa was supposed to go door to door killing white people and Christians.

And yet, despite mounting evidence of conspiracy and murderous intent, there have been virtually no calls to declare Vanguard America, or related groups, terrorist organizations.

On Aug. 12, James Alex Fields was photographed wearing the uniform and carrying the shield of Vanguard America. The first thing I saw when I got to Charlottesville was Vanguard America members chanting: “You can’t run; you can’t hide; you get helicopter rides!” at leftist protesters, whom they then attacked with sticks. The chant was a reference to Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing death squads. Some press outlets have been woefully gullible at allowing these organizations to call such threats jokes—even when they are accompanied by actual violence.

Thanks to a series of chats on a gaming app uncovered by the media collective Unicorn Riot, we know that people involved in planning the rallies also “joked” about running people over with their cars. Then Fields followed through, committing murder.

Others involved in Vanguard America have shown that the organization as a whole, and not just Fields, had terrorist intent. William Fears, who spent much of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville trying to stab people with a flag pole, has identified himself as a member of Vanguard America. He; his brother Colton; and another man named Tyler Tenbrink were in Gainesville, Fla., following the flop of a Nazi rally led by Richard Spencer. They allegedly pulled their Jeep up to a group of anti-fascist protesters and began yelling, “Heil Hitler.” Someone in the group hit their Jeep with a baton. The three men then jumped out of their Jeep, and the Fears brothers reportedly yelled, “I’m going to fucking kill you,” and, “Shoot them!” as Tenbrink got out of the car with a gun and fired it at the people.

“Us coming in and saying we’re taking over your town, we’re starting to push back, we’re starting to want to intimidate back,” Fears had told the Gainesville Sun earlier that day. “We want to show our teeth a little bit, because, you know, we’re not to be taken lightly. We don’t want violence; we don’t want harm. But at the end of the day, we’re not opposed to defending ourselves.”

Then he justified the Charlottesville terrorist attack carried out by James Alex Fields as self-defense.

“They threw the first blow,” he said. “I look at it as self-defense whether he just was radicalized and said, ‘You know, I’m just going to mow these people down,’ or whether he was in fear for his life—but they threw the first blow, so I’m going to take his side.”

Fears, who says he was previously radicalized in prison, was arrested along with his brother and Tenbrink and charged with attempted murder.

So here we have a situation in which a member of Vanguard America justifies a murder committed by another member of the same group hours before allegedly attempting to commit another murder—both actions seemingly based on political ideology. What else do we need to treat Vanguard America like we do window-breaking leftists wearing black?

After I wrote the original version of this story went to press, the terrorist attack on a church in Texas took place, with 26 people killed. The perpetrator was white—and the president has not yet called him a terrorist or suggested Guantanamo.

If suspects wear all-black and look like punks, then they are all responsible for any crime committed by someone who looks like them, as the arrest of 200 people on Inauguration Day shows. If suspects have brown skin, then Trump, Kelly, Vanguard America and the rest of the alt-right see them as terrorists, even in the absence of an actual crime. This idea of collective, preemptive guilt is enshrined in extreme vetting. But polo-wearing white guys are never judged as part of a group—even when they wear its uniforms or carry its shields. That’s how white supremacy works.

Baynard Woods is a reporter at the Real News Network and the founder of Democracy in Crisis, a joint project of alternative newspapers across the country, including the Coachella Valley Independent. Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; Twitter @baynardwoods.

In a tax speech in Pennsylvania on Oct. 11, President Trump gave a shout out to "the great Jeffrey Lord.”

He went on to explain that Lord “was on fake news CNN for a long time. He was one of my few sources of truth."

CNN severed ties with Lord after he tweeted “sieg heil,” a Nazi salutation.

Trump’s flirtation with racism is nothing new; it extends back through the campaign and into many facets of the presidency. He called the white supremacists in Charlottesville “very fine people” and has repeatedly refused to condemn hate groups. But the precise mechanisms by which the administration and allied media outlets like Breitbart act as bridges to normalize hate groups are becoming increasingly clear.

Buzzfeed’s massive Oct. 5 story on the right-wing provocateur showed that Milo Yiannopoulos sent at least one major Breitbart story to a number of white supremacists to vet and line-edit. In a video embedded in the story, Richard Spencer and others gave a Nazi salute as Yiannopoulos sang “America the Beautiful” at karaoke. (Scroll down to see the video.) Milo even spiked a story at the suggestion of white nationalist Devin Saucier, a friend of Spencer’s.

Yiannopoulos was forced out of Breitbart after an old tape in which he appears to condone pedophilia came out, but he has remained in contact with the major funders to the site, the billionaire Mercer family, which supported funded Milo Inc.

Bannon, who had declared the Mercer-funded Breitbart to be a “platform for the alt-right,” left the site to run Trump’s campaign and work as a senior adviser to the White House. He returned to the site when he was ousted shortly after the white-nationalist terror attack in Charlottesville.

“Dude—we r in a global existentialist war where our enemy EXISTS in social media and u r jerking yourself off w/ marginalia!!!!,” he wrote to Milo. “U should be OWNING this conversation because u r everything they hate!!! Drop your toys, pick up your tools and go help save western civilization.”

“Western civilization” is often code for whiteness. It is less offensive, and less likely to scare away potential converts.

In his New York Times Magazinestory on the Breitbart, Wil S. Hylton (a friend of mine) talked to Yochai Benkler, a professor who had been studying the site’s rise.

Breitbart, according to Benkler’s study, was three times more influential than its closest rival, Fox News, during the 2016 election. In this way, it has, according to Benkler, served as a sort of filter that helps legitimize racist ideas. Benkler told Hylton: “Breitbart is not talking about these issues in the same way you would find on the extreme right. … They don’t use the same language you find on sites like VDARE and The Daily Stormer'’—two sites connected to the white-nationalist alt-right movement.

But they are talking about the same issues, and the fact that they don’t use the same language is what makes Breitbart effective as a “bridge” that, in Hylton’s words, “functioned as a legitimizing tether for the most abhorrent currents of the right wing.”

Now that we know that Yiannopoulos actually sent “his” Breitbart stories (which were often not actually written by him) to Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, who works at the Daily Stormer, the bridge phenomenon comes off a bit differently.

“What we saw in our larger-scale analysis was that Breitbart was offering a bridge, a translation platform from the white nationalists to the rest, but that the language and framing was sufficiently different to not be read directly as white nationalist,” Benkler responded in an email when I asked about the Milo story. “To the extent that the BuzzFeed news story is correct in its details, it describes in great detail the level process by which the ideas were transferred, but then still partly sanitized for consumption by people who would be receptive to the ideas, but not the messenger (e.g. Daily Stormer) or the very specific explicitly white nationalist language.”

Trump himself has often acted as a similar kind of bridge. Although he first endorsed Luther Strange to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ old Senate seat in an Alabama special election, Trump has now come around to fully supporting Roy Moore, the theocratic former Alabama judge twice removed from office for failing to recognize the rulings of a higher court, who beat Strange in the special election Republican primary for the Senate seat.

But Moore is himself acting as a bridge for even more extreme figures.

As Talking Points Memo recently reported, Moore’s top supporter is Michael Peroutka, which the site described as a “hardline Confederate sympathizer with longtime ties to a secessionist group” who has “expressed beliefs that make even Moore’s arguably theocratic anti-gay and anti-Muslim views look mainstream by comparison.”

Peroutka, a secessionist and debt-collection attorney, ran for president in 2004 for the Constitution Party. A decade later, in 2014, he ran for the county council in Anne Arundel County, Md., and was supported by Moore, whom Peroutka has honored by naming a field on his farm for the Alabamian. In 2012, Peroutka asked attendees of a League of the South conference to “stand for the national anthem” and proceeded to play “Dixie.” (Scroll down to watch the video.)

So as the president and his administration continue to throw fits about athletes “disrespecting the flag” by taking a knee during the national anthem, they are actively supporting or receiving support from racist extremists who support either the Nazis or the Confederacy. In the same way that Breitbart launders the extremist views of the Daily Stormer, making them more palatable, the administration is acting as a bridge to legitimize those elements on the right that are even more extreme than Trump.

Baynard Woods is a reporter at the Real News Network. Democracy in Crisis is a joint project of alternative newspapers across the country, including the Coachella Valley Independent. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Twitter: @baynardwoods.

Francois LeFranc, 45, lingers over breakfast in the dining room of the NAV Centre, an Ontario hotel and conference center on the banks of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, he displays only one sign that he had been detained by the Canadian immigration authorities five days earlier: a plastic, hospital-style turquoise bracelet he wears with his I.D. number on it.

He slipped across the border in upstate New York and into Quebec with his wife and four kids, leaving his oldest daughter, 20, behind.

Although it has not gotten as much attention as the repeal of DACA, the promised repeal of another protection to immigrants—the temporary protected status offered by Barack Obama to Haitian immigrants following the 2010 earthquake—has led LeFranc and more than 5,000 others to seek asylum in Canada since Aug.1.

It took LeFranc until 2012 to finally reach the U.S. “We are looking for a better life,” he says. “I was looking for a better education for my children.”

Now, fearful of being deported back to Haiti, he is one of 294 Haitian immigrants wandering the halls and grounds of this conference center in the sleepy city of Cornwall, population 50,000. He is part of a mass exodus of Haitian asylum-seekers, fleeing the U.S. on the heels of a letter that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent to the approximately 58,000 Haitian refugees resettled in the U.S. since the 2010 earthquake. The letter informs them that their TPS will likely be revoked in January, and warns them to arrange their departure from the U.S. It seems the Trump administration has declared Haiti’s earthquake recovery complete; its refugees must go back.

The announcement was made the same day the U.S. government updated its travel warning for those considering a trip to Haiti. “The Department of State warns U.S. citizens to carefully consider the risks of traveling to Haiti due to its current security environment and lack of adequate medical facilities and response,” the State Department website warns. It goes on to state that “medical care infrastructure, ambulances, and other emergency services are limited throughout Haiti.”

The Miami Herald reports that panic raced through Florida’s large Haitian community when they learned they would be sent back to their still-troubled homeland—and many of them have turned to Canada for help. The migrants are pouring over the border near the small Quebec town of Hemmingford and then turning themselves in for arrest by Canadian border officials, who bring them to a series of temporary holding centers as they begin processing the paperwork, with the Haitians pleading their asylum cases.

The French-speaking Haitians are attracted to Quebec, which also has a sizeable Haitian community—but with immigration processing centers there bursting at the seams, the federal government moved this group of nearly 300 to the neighboring province of Ontario over the course of two days in Augus. Within a week, they had a tent city prepared to accommodate 800 refugees here.

It’s a curious scene.

On one section of the conference center’s vast green lawn, musicians are making their way to a massive white event tent where hundreds of locals will soon pour in for the annual MusicFest, “The Barley and Hops Tour,” with $40 tickets at the door.

Within sight of concert-goers are 50 black Army tents, erected by the Royal Canadian Dragoons (soldiers) in the last 24 hours to house the anticipated influx of 500 more Haitian migrants, according to Lt. Karyn Mazurek, an Army public affairs officer.

A heavy metal band warm-up is punctuated by the sounds of rapid-fire nail guns as five carpenters build tent platforms for the migrants in a garage bay nestled between the refugees’ tent city and the music tent. Inside the upscale NAV Centre (overnight golf packages run $170), patrons get wedding-planning tours; a Christian group coalesces in the lobby; soldiers in fatigues stride the halls; and migrants use the glass-encased miniature model of the hotel to both get their geographical bearings and pepper an official with questions about the worn documents they pull from purses and pockets to press on the glass for inspection. Soldiers share a smoke with a few refugees near an exit; one migrant asks directions to the local pharmacy. The asylum seekers are free to roam.

It’s a far cry from U.S. detention centers.

Still, the efficiency and kindness Canadians are displaying should not be misconstrued as welcoming the asylum seekers with open arms. Over dinner tables, at border crossings, and in the press, Canadians are having many of the same debates over immigration that Americans have been having.

Back in January, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded to the anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. by tweeting, “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength. #WelcomeToCanada.”

But by Aug. 5, with Montreal’s Olympic Stadium temporarily housing hundreds of the arriving Haitians, Trudeau cautioned, "We remain an open and compassionate country, but part of remaining that way is reassuring Canadians that we are processing properly all of these new arrivals," he said. At the same time, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen, in an interview with the CBC, warned against what Canadians politely refer to as “irregular” border crossings.

Back in the NAV Center’s Propeller Dining Room, LeFranc finishes his breakfast. Since arriving in the U.S., he says, he has worked construction jobs to support his family. His kids have spent their formative years in America, with his oldest daughter attending college until recently, when her immigration status rendered her unable to qualify for student loans.

“I am waiting to see if I can find a way for the children to go to school and to find work to help my family. The children does not know nothing about Haiti,” he says.

He doesn’t know how things will turn out for his family in Canada. “I’m just taking a chance,” he says.

“We live a life of struggle,” he says with a shrug. “If your eyes are open, you will see struggle all around you. That’s the way life is.”

Democracy in Crisis is a joint project of alternative newspapers around the country, including the Coachella Valley Independent. Send tips to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Twitter @demoincrisis. Podcast every Thursday at www.democracyincrisis.com.

Two middle-aged men, one black and one white, were walking up a street in downtown Charlottesville, Va., yelling at each other. It was a moment of relative normalcy in a day otherwise defined by mayhem.

Both men use the phrase “born and bred” to define their relationship to the smallish Southern college town, nestled in the hills in the politically contested state of Virginia.

The white man, Ed Knight, was wearing a Confederate flag bandana around his head.

“You, with that stupid Confederate flag, talking about history,” the black man, George Steppe, said. “You don’t know nothing about no history. Only thing you know is hate.”

“This is our history, and it should not be destroyed,” Knight said about the statue of Robert E. Lee in the park—which the Charlottesville City Council has voted to remove—where an alt-right Unite the Right rally had been scheduled.

Knight supported the rally that brought hundreds of armed racists and fascists to his home city on Saturday, Aug. 12. It also brought hundreds of anti-fascists—some of them armed with sticks and shields as well—pledging to defend the city from right-wing terror. Now, after hours of bloody battle during which they remained largely passive, riot police were breaking things up, pushing Steppe back, inching forward behind their shields. Knight walked alongside with a sign: “Make C-Ville Great Again.”

The chaos started the night before, as the Nazis and other racists gathered for the 21st-century version of a Klan rally—a Klanclave of khaki and tiki torches. At one point, a group of white supremacists surrounded a group of counter-protesters, throwing punches and torches.

Within minutes of arriving in town on Saturday morning, we saw the first of many fights. White supremacists had helmets—some German, World War II-era—as well as white polos, sticks, an assortment of flags and homemade shields marked with the insignia of the racist group Vanguard America. They chanted at a smaller crowd of counter-protesters.

“You can’t run; you can’t hide; you get helicopter rides,” they said, a reference to far-right governments in Argentina and Chile in the ’70s and ’80s that threw leftists from helicopters to “disappear” them.

The racists began to march forward, and the anti-racists tried to block them. After a swirl of violence and swinging sticks, three of the counter-protesters were left with bloody faces—the racists seemed to target women’s faces with their sticks—and the racists, who also took some heavy blows, ran away as the cops rolled in and began setting up a barricade.

Over the next several hours, this same pattern continued to play out: Another fight broke out every few minutes as a new faction of the right marched in its crazed armor toward the park.

The park was filled with every variety of racist you can imagine, from the Nazi biker to the fashy computer programmer. They were almost exclusively white and male. The anti-fascist activists who packed the streets were predominantly white as well, but there were far more women and people of color opposing the Nazis. The two opposing armies seemed to be of roughly equal size. The fights were swift, chaotic and brutal.

The two sides launched bottles and tear-gas canisters back and forth as state troopers stood and watched, slack-jawed. At one point, as a few bottles whizzed by him in quick succession, a trooper perked up enough to pull out his phone and record some of the mayhem.

When the police declared the assembly illegal before it even began and told everyone to leave, it forced these groups together. Right-wing militia types wielding assault rifles and wearing “Make America Great Again” patches on paramilitary uniforms roamed through the crowd. Guys with pistols seemed to keep their hands on them, ready to draw at any moment. It felt like something horrible would happen.

Then, as the various groups became separated, it seemed like the rumble was largely over.

“I’m glad no serious gunshots rang out. I was threatened with a gun, though. Police wasn’t around when a guy pulled up his gun up on me,” Steppe said, around 12:30 p.m.

Steppe and Knight both seemed to think that it was the end of the day. The racists, who had not been able to hold their rally, were trying to regroup at another park a little farther from downtown. Eventually, as a state of emergency was declared, most of them decided to leave. Some of them even suggested hiding in the woods.

Antifa—an anti-fascist group—burned right-wing flags in a park and then marched through the city; two groups converged on Water Street around 1:35 p.m. It felt triumphant. They had driven the racists out of town—at least those who were from out of town.

The feeling would not last. About five minutes later, it sounded like a bomb exploded as a muscle car—which police say was driven by alt-right member James Alex Fields—sped down the street and plowed through the march and into other cars. Fields then threw the weaponized car into reverse, fleeing from the scene of terror.

Bodies were strewn through the road. Street medics, marked by red tape, delivered first aid while waiting on ambulances to arrive. Activists held Antifa banners to block camera views of the injured.

The other alt-righters were nowhere to be found.

The same day, Trump meandered through a speech in New Jersey in which he condemned violence on "many sides." He did not use the words “white supremacy” or “terrorism.” He did not say the name of Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed in the terror attack. He did not offer support to the 19 others who were hospitalized or prayers for those who were still in critical condition.

Fields, who was photographed earlier in the day with the same Vanguard America shield we saw when we first arrived in town, was later arrested and charged with murder.

I won’t to pretend to know what this all means for our country. The racism is not new. The argument Steppe and Knight were having in their hometown could have happened any time within the last 50 years. But the way the battle over white supremacy was being waged around them was new. Charlottesville was not ready for it. None of us are.

When that gray car slammed into those people, it shattered a part of America, or at least the illusion of it. I don’t know what that means yet, because it shattered something in me, too.

Additional reporting by Brandon Soderberg. Democracy in Crisis is a joint project of alternative newspapers around the country, including the Coachella Valley Independent. Baynard Woods is editor at large at the Baltimore City Paper. Send tips to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Twitter @demoincrisis. Podcast every Thursday at www.democracyincrisis.com. Below: Counter-protesters just moments before police say James Alex Fields drove his car through the crowd.

In the early years of the Obama era, then-Sen. Jim DeMint embodied a series of contradictions in the American character.

The hard-jawed and bitter-faced South Carolinian was simultaneously a theocrat, a cynic and a salesman. What he sold, as salvation, was hate and fear. He realized before the rest of us that it does not matter what politicians say or do, as long as they can demonize their enemies, turning them into villains that the American people can love to hate.

DeMint came from the fundamentalist, mill-village town of Greenville, nestled in the piedmont at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from the North Carolina border. BMW and Michelin have recently turned the town into a somewhat more cosmopolitan place. But 20 years ago—when I finally escaped—it was a town that produced dire, dour and yet grimly visionary people, a severe, joyless place whose preachers obsessed over hell fire and the enjoyable things other people may be doing to hasten it.

DeMint galvanized the Tea Party with this shtick, but he could only take it so far: It was a little too grim for the American Sucker. DeMint played the part like a great character actor—Harry Dean Stanton playing Ronald Reagan. Trump came along and brought a little P.T. Barnum to the act, taking DeMint’s gruesome view of America at war with itself and carnivalizing the carnage, in the same way televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart made the hell-fire sermons they heard in small Southern churches palatable to the masses on television.

“The bigger government gets, the smaller God gets,” DeMint said in a radio appearance in 2011. Trump echoed this in May when he told a crowd at the fundamentalist Liberty University, “In America, we don’t worship government; we worship God.”

Perhaps DeMint was savvy enough to know he would do better as a vicar or an éminence grise, providing ideas to the crown rather than being the front man: The Greenville in him was still a little too mirthless to break through to the next level. He left the Senate on Jan. 1, 2013, to take over the ultra-conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.

During last year’s presidential election, the foundation remained largely silent on Trump, putting DeMint in a perfect position to help guide the seemingly shocked and ill-prepared transition team. It provided policy papers, personnel and a list of Supreme Court nominees, deeply influencing the beginning of the Trump era.

So it was a shocker—and sort of admirable—when the Heritage board ousted DeMint in May, with influential members arguing he had dulled the intellectual edge of the foundation by making it too activist.

After his Heritage ouster, the former senator went to work for the Convention of States Project. This is a group that wants to invoke Article V of the Constitution to call for a convention to amend the Constitution.

Article V outlines two ways to add an amendment to the Constitution—and one of them has never been successfully employed before. Each of the 27 existing amendments has been proposed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratified by three-fourths of the states. In the other way, two-thirds of the legislatures of the states can “call a convention for proposing amendments.”

The conventional, previously used way is politically impossible at present, and to a man like DeMint, undesirable. But the alternate way, relying on the states as it does, is almost too perfect an ideological vehicle. DeMint calls the Convention of States the next stage of the Tea Party, which wanted to limit federal power. It makes ideological sense for him to latch onto state legislatures’ ability to change the Constitution to limit federal power.

But the crazy thing: It might actually be possible. Two-thirds of 50 is 34. That’s how many state legislatures would have to request a convention. Republicans hold both houses in 32 states. If a convention relying on state legislatures would ever work for the right, it would now.

Twelve states have already requested a convention to amend the Constitution. Over the last few weeks, DeMint was lobbying hard in North Carolina to make it the 13th. It passed the Senate, and failed in the House, which later voted to reconsider it.

One of the big problems is the possibility of a “runaway convention.” The Convention of States argues that such a convention could be limited to a single topic: limiting federal control. But because a constitutional convention has never happened, no one knows how it will go.

As for the desire of DeMint and his crew to limit federal control: They want to institute congressional and Supreme Court term limits; mandate a balanced budget; and eliminate federal regulations. While it seems like such a focus may be opposed to the Trump regime, it fits in perfectly with its stated goal of the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as Steve Bannon put it.

And Trump’s new voter commission—headed up by Kris Kobach, a dour Kansas extremist who is the perfect DeMint counterpart—might make the possibility of a new states-driven, conservative-leaning constitutional convention even more likely. The Trump/Kobach commission is requiring states to give voter data to the federal government (although many have refused), claiming, sans any evidence, that widespread voter fraud cost Trump the popular vote. Many fear there is an alternative motive to this data collection—namely, that it will be used to further restrict voting.

The state-level dominance that Republicans presently enjoy is due in large part to gerrymandering, and successful attempts to limit the votes of minorities and others who might vote Democrat. (The pusillanimous posturing of the Democrats doesn’t help.) If they are further able to control the turnout, Republicans will be more likely to gain even more states, increasing the likelihood of a constitutional convention.

The contradiction gives yet another glimpse into today’s so-called conservative movement, and is reminiscent of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ own hypocrisy—he claims to be pro-states’ rights, but is rejecting state decisions to legalize cannabis and is trying to force states to comply with big-government mandatory minimum sentencing. Conservatives are speaking out of both sides of their mouths, saying they want to strip power from the federal government, but using the federal government’s power to do so, by first attacking citizens’ voting rights.

Democracy in Crisis is a joint project of alternative newspapers around the country, including the Coachella Valley Independent. Baynard Woods is editor at large at the Baltimore City Paper. Send tips to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Twitter @demoincrisis. Podcast every Thursday at www.democracyincrisis.com.

Dozens of defendants, each sitting with their own lawyer, fill a Washington, D.C., courtroom, looking like college students wearing their nicest clothes for a job interview.

However, the situation here is far more serious: They are all facing charges of felony rioting, conspiracy to riot and destruction of property on the morning of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when they were scooped up en masse by police with a controversial crowd-control technique which corrals protesters in a “kettle.”

This is only one of the four groups among the 215 defendants who have been indicted on nearly identical charges. Many had to travel back to the District of Columbia to be arraigned on this Friday, June 9.

One man who traveled here from Santa Fe, N.M., is sitting with his lawyer off to the side. He wears a black suit, has a black goatee and identifies himself as Tejano. He looks around the room like he is taking notes. Everyone else has already been arraigned before Judge Lynn Leibovitz. But this man, Aaron Cantú, wasn’t indicted until May 30, just a week before the hearing. He is a journalist, who has written about policing, propaganda, drugs and politics for The Intercept, Al Jazeera, The Baffler, and many other publications. Reporting from the Republican National Convention on the possibility of a Trump presidency, Cantú wrote, “dream darker.”

Like the others being charged, he’s now facing up to 70 years in prison.

As various protests spread through the city on the morning of the inauguration, one group used “black bloc” techniques—wearing all black and acting in concert to attack symbols of multinational capitalism in a semi-anonymous fashion—in an attempt to disrupt the spectacle of the event, breaking windows of businesses like Starbucks and Bank of America.

“Individuals participating in the Black Bloc broke the windows of a limousine parked on the north side of K Street NW, and assaulted the limousine driver as he stood near the vehicle,” the indictment reads, “as Aaron Cantu and others moved west on K Street NW.”

These black blocs have received widespread media attention in America since 1999, beginning with the Battle of Seattle at the World Trade Organization summit. A black bloc action is newsworthy—and yet, according to the indictment, Cantú is being charged for moving in proximity to the group he was covering.

The indictment alleges that Cantú wore black and discarded a backpack as evidence of his part in the conspiracy. Because members of a conspiracy to riot wore black, anyone wearing black, it seems, is a member of the conspiracy.

It is a crazy, complicated, sprawling case involving evidence from somewhere around 200 cell phones and various cameras. The discovery process will take months.

In Washington, D.C., criminal cases that elsewhere would be handled by the state are prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s office—so each prosecutor here ultimately answers to the president of the United States. Although most of the charges were first brought by an Obama appointee, this is a perfect example of what justice may look like in the Trump era. Like the travel ban, it is a grand draconian gesture followed by a lot of confusion.

During the arraignment, prosecutor Jennifer Kerkhoff expressed concerns about finding herself in a “Brady trick bag,” referring to the law that requires the prosecution to turn over all relevant evidence in discovery. How does she know what material on someone’s phone might be relevant to another’s case? And how does the prosecution protect the privacy of co-defendants with data that is not relevant?

“Can I just stop you?” Judge Leibovitz says to Kerkhoff as she talks about efficiency. “You brought charges against 215 people.”

The judge does not have to finish.

Leibovitz set most of the trial dates for October 2018, so that all evidence can be properly dealt with.

“It’s concerning and confusing,” says Christopher Gowen, an American University law professor and partner at his own firm who was appointed to the case. “The fact that we are already here and the amount of resources being spent to get to where we are now leads me to believe we are going to have to sit through all these trials. All this taxpayer money is going to be wasted.”

Gowen says that his client, Cabal Bhatt, was charged on the basis of wearing a bandana on his face to protect himself from police pepper spray.

As the names of each of the defendants are called—Cantú and his co-defendants all plead not guilty—I think about how I was almost arrested reporting on the same events that day. I watched as the black bloc came around the corner, flanked by police. Trash cans rolled through the street. Pepper spray came out. An officer ran at me with her stick. I held up the media credentials hanging around my neck and yelled, “Press!” She went around me. I was lucky.

At the advice of his lawyers, Cantú isn’t talking to the press. I ask Julie Ann Grimm, his editor at the Santa Fe Reporter, which hired him in April, if the charges make her more reluctant to assign him to certain stories.

“His arrest was scary. The threat of being imprisoned for the rest of your life for just doing your job and observing a protest is … I don’t even know how to finish that sentence,” she says over the phone. “I think Aaron is nervous about covering protests. I’m slightly nervous about sending him out to them. But we’re really not going to let this action by the federal government or by the prosecutors in Washington, D.C., slow him down or to put a muzzle on his voice as a journalist.”

Still, she says, he might do a couple things differently now. “He will probably try to stay very separate from the people who are a part of the news event, and he will probably wear something like a tie.”

But Grimm is quick to stress that Cantú is not the only one in this case whose rights are being violated.

“We’re all standing up for Aaron, and this affects our industry and our identity as journalists,” Grimm says. “But the larger sort of corralling, the kettling, the mass-arresting is also troubling.”

As Cantú wrote from the RNC: “Imagining the worst possible future your mind can conjure is an essential step to avoiding a world you do not want to live in. Things are bad, very bad, and we will fuck them up even worse if we can’t acknowledge how very bad they are.”

Democracy in Crisis is a joint project of alternative newspapers around the country, including the Coachella Valley Independent. Baynard Woods is editor at large at the Baltimore City Paper. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, Salon, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review and many other publications. Send tips to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Twitter @demoincrisis. Podcast every Thursday at www.democracyincrisis.com. Below: The black bloc in Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Day. Photo by Baynard Woods.

Hundreds of people were lined up in the marble hallways of a Senate office building, hoping to get one of the 88 public seats in Room 216, where James Comey, the FBI director Trump fired over the Russia investigation, was scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. on Thursday, June 8.

That was at 8:30 a.m. More came. Some of the people waiting in the winding line said they’d arrived at 4 a.m. Bars were opening early, and for once, it seemed like reporters and senators were the only people in Washington, D.C., not day-drinking.

Yes, this was serious shit.

Comey said that Trump asked him for loyalty. It freaked the then-director out—because if the FBI is not independent of political factions, it becomes a secret police force abetting tyranny or totalitarian control.

At one point, Comey tried to explain why he had assured Trump that he wasn’t personally under an investigation on several occasions.

Comey also said he told the president about salacious material—the Russian sex workers pissing on the bed the Obamas slept in, I guess—in a dossier gathered by a former intelligence official and later published by BuzzFeed; he didn’t want Trump to think the FBI would use the material against him.

“I was worried very much of being in kind of a—kind of a J. Edgar Hoover-type situation,” Comey said, referring to the legendary director—you might say dictator—of the FBI for half a century.

It was remarkable to hear Comey talk this way about the man more associated with the bureau than anyone else—but he had good reason: It helps us contextualize what is happening now, because things were even more fucked-up a century ago. That should make us feel a little better.

Hoover—a powerful, paranoid and proud eccentric—crafted the modern FBI. He started working for the Department of Justice in 1917. The country had finally entered World War I in April of that year. Two years earlier, in 1915, as the war in Europe escalated, Germany feared U.S. involvement and began a propaganda campaign (or “active measures,” as we’re calling it). As Tim Weiner writes in his book Enemies: A History of the FBI, a German official “began to build a propaganda machine in the United States; the Germans secretly gained control of a major New York newspaper, the Evening Mail; their front men negotiated to buy The Washington Post and the New York Sun. Political fixers, corrupt Germans and crooked detectives served the German cause.”

The U.S. eventually entered the war, and the government—especially the bureau, which worked under the Department of Justice—began to arrest and surveil German immigrants.

“The bureau launched its first nationwide domestic surveillance programs under the Espionage Act of 1917, rounding up radicals, wiretapping conversations, and opening mail,” Weiner writes, noting that more than 1,000 people were convicted under the act.

In 1920, a few years later, Hoover orchestrated the “biggest mass arrest in U.S. history,” according to Weiner’s research in unclassified documents, when the bureau “broke into political meetings, private homes, social clubs, dance halls and saloons across America,” arresting more than 6,000 people, for many of whom there were no warrants.

Back in the modern day, 200 people, including a reporter, were charged with felony rioting after protests on inauguration day; the reporter was arraigned the day after Comey’s testimony. Reality Winner, the federal contractor who leaked secrets about Russian attempts to hack voting machines in 2016, was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act a couple of days earlier.

It’s still hard to imagine the scope of those 1920 raids. It shouldn’t be.

Hoover later distanced himself from the raids and denied involvement. But rather than backing off as outrage grew over the violations of civil liberties, Hoover started to collect secret files on his political enemies. That’s what Comey was referring to when he referred to a Hoover-type situation.

David Grann’s stunning new book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, shows how valuable a centralized investigative force can be in its detailing of the early FBI’s role in solving at least some of the murders of the indigenous Osage people in Oklahoma in the early 20th century, committed as a means to steal their money. The entire white power structure—from businesspeople to police to doctors—were in on the conspiracy to kill the Osage. But the FBI was outside of that local structure and was able to solve and prosecute some of the crimes as a result.

But much of the bureau’s history is shameful, reactionary and racist, as in COINTELPRO, or Counterintelligence Program, which targeted civil rights and peace activists in the 1960s. In a 2015 talk, Comey said he kept Hoover’s application for a warrant to wiretap Martin Luther King Jr., which cited “Communist influence in the racial situation,” on his desk. He said he required agents to study the Bureau’s MLK files and other instances of injustice, “to ensure that we remember our mistakes and that we learn from them.”

The idea of remembering our mistakes and learning from them is about as far as you can get from the whitewashed view of history implicit in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Trump doesn’t seem like a person who is capable of admitting, much less learning from, a mistake, so the Senate needs to be particularly vigilant in their confirmation of Christopher Wray, Chris Christie’s Bridgegate lawyer, whose appointment as Comey’s replacement was announced over Twitter the day before Comey testified.

Things may seem bad now, but the bureau’s previous political persecution of the left, immigrants and minorities should remind us that they can always get worse.

Democracy in Crisis is a joint project of alternative newspapers around the country, including the Coachella Valley Independent. Baynard Woods is editor at large at the Baltimore City Paper. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, Salon, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review and many other publications. Send tips to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Twitter @demoincrisis. Podcast every Thursday at www.democracyincrisis.com.